I can't remember a time in my life without owning books. As a child, I belonged to the "book of the month club" and I remember standing on the porch, waiting for the mail carrier to bring that huge cardboard box filled with new hardcover picture books. Even before I could read words on a page, I knew I was a reader. Even now, I still own several of my childhood books. Though most are missing their covers and their inside pages are tattered, they hold value; these are my passports to literacy.
The Pig Book
No one knows what happened to The Pig Book's glossy hard cover. One day it simply disappeared, perhaps slipping beneath the sagging frame of our sectional couch, or maybe it's tucked in some corner of a dark, cluttered closet. Now this book is just a stack of torn, ruffled-edged pages, its crumbling binding held together with brown masking tape. Maybe that's why I started calling it The Pig Book. When the cover disappeared, I couldn't read the "real" title anyway. So, Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever became the Pig Book, and no one asked why. It was just a worn, coverless book that no one else seemed to care about. But, to me it was special. Inside this book was a world where animals live, sleep, laugh, and play under a sky that is always painted brilliant blue. In these pages, bears, dogs, pigs, cats, and rabbits dress in overalls and business suits, wear aprons and firefighter hats. Here animals push shopping carts down the aisles of the supermarket and build sandcastles on beaches. Here rabbits till the corn fields, pigs smile from behind the butcher's counter, and whole families of cats join together to eat a turkey dinner. This world was a magical place where even worms and beetles drive insect-size cars, and sometimes those cars are in the shape of a pickle.
I didn't need to know how to read, how to sound out letters and string those sounds into words, to know that this book told stories. As many stories as I could imagine the pigs and bears and cats living in their bright little world. All I had to do was flip open a page, and I could hop on the firetruck zooming through the city streets, lay back on the hay wagon as it rumbled down a dirt road, or climb a steep mountain p
The Pig Book
ath with a family of goats. I never questioned or wondered why this world was full of animals rather than people. I just imagined myself right into this place, feeling happy as the cloudless skies and perfectly round sun drawn on every page.
The strange, silvery object
My sunny days in The Pig Book quickly ended one afternoon as I watched Mother Pig and her piglets bake cookies in their bright yellow kitchen. On these pages, cooking utensils, appliances, and food were scattered across Mother Pig's counter. There was a brown funnel and a powder blue electric mixer, broken egg shells and a bottle of ketchup. The entire kitchen must have been buzzing with noise: beaters mixing cookie dough, piglets licking spoons, and the clang of metal baking sheets scraping the oven's wire racks. This kitchen probably smelled like warm vanilla, just like my kitchen at Christmas when my mom, sister and I baked sugar cookies for all our neighboors. This kitchen was busy and loud, messy and perfect - except for one small detail. Right there, in the middle of the page, one the piglets was using a strange thing to stir cookie dough. Piglet was holding something in his hands - something silvery and wirey.
In The Kitchen
I took the book to my "real" kitchen, hoping to find this strange, new object. I started with the bottom cupboards, the two next to the oven.
Here were our mixing bowls, stacked with the smallest on the inside. The biggest one was orange, like the shag carpet in our TV room, and it had a large chip at the top. I peered inside the big orange bowl, there was nothing inside that looked like piglet's silvery object. So, I pushed the stack of bowls aside and looked behind them. There were all our metal baking pans - all different shapes and sizes, from small little rectangles, just right for banana bread, to wide, flat circle pans, which we always used for making pizza. Nowhere in this mountain of metal, though, was the wirey little object from my book. Where to look next?
Above the two cupboards were two wide drawers. I pulled both of them open. Inside one was a mish-mash of utensils - white, rubber spatulas; wooden spoons; big, black soup ladels; and spiky-tipped pastry brushes. Something small and silver was peeking out from under a pancake turner. I dug through the utensils and pulled it out - it was thin and wirey, a small metal whisk that my mom used to make scrambled eggs. Laying the whisk on the page of my book, I looked at both objects. They were both silver, but they weren't exactly the same. Piglet's object had a turney wheel and a wide, round handle. My whisk was just a whisk, a spool of thin metal with no wheel, no handle.
Tossing the whisk on the floor, I turned to the next drawer. Maybe Piglet's strange thing was in here. I plunged my fingers into a tangle of measuring spoons and found big ones, little ones, all them plastic and different colors. I knew the red one was the one we used for making cookies. The purple one my dad used to scoop coffee out of a big can. This wasn't what I wanted. I dug deeper into the drawer; here I found measuring cups, the same color as the spoons, and a plastic bag full of little metal things. Opening up the bag, I could see these were decorating tips for frosting. We used these to make our Christmas cookies. But that's all that was in the bag. No other tools or utensils, no silvery metal thing like Piglet.
Piglet uses the egg beater
The missing egg beater
Frustrated that I couldn't find this strange thing that I also couldn't name, I started opening another cupboard door when my mom walked into the kitchen. I showed here the picture of piglet and his mysterious, silver object. Pointing to the words on the page, she showed me that this strange thing was called an egg beater. "Don't we have one?" I asked. She answered, "No." "But why?" I persisted. Shrugging her shoulders, she sighed, "Well, I guess we don't really need one."
I didn't really like her answer. The silvery, wispery egg beater looked like a fun thing to own. I could just imagine myself perched on a stool, leaning over the counter, just like piglet. I could feel the small handle grasped in my fingers and hear the whir of its spinning wheel as it stired together dough. It didn't matter that we had a perfectly good electric mixer, a drawer full of wooden spoons, and all sorts of other nifty cooking utensils. I wanted an egg beater; I wanted my kitchen to look like the pig family's kitchen. Somehow their kitchen seemed perfect, more complete, than my own.
Literacy Lessons from The Pig Book
Reflecting on this experience as an adult reader, thinker, writer and teacher, I wonder how my confusion over the missing egg beater affected my perceptions concerning the "truths" books contain and my understanding that language holds power.
Which world is real? I find it interesting that an item as seemingly insignificant as an egg beater could cause me so much confusion. Why did this small kitchen utensil make me compare my world to Mother Pig's? It seems more logical that I would be troubled by the fact that this entire book is not populated by humans but by animals. Somehow, my young mind had no trouble accepting that in Richard Scarry's world, characters like Little Bear, Mother Pig, and Mr. Mouse get dressed, bake cookies, and drive cars. These characters appear, behave, and speak just like the humans I would have encountered in my real life. Likewise, these characters would not have resembled any actual animals in their appearance or actions. Even as a child, I must have understood that these characters were fictional; they were simply prettily-drawn symbols created to represent how people interact in the real world. These were meant to be "pretend" animals.
If I don't understand it, is it real or pretend? Contrasted to the animal characters, the egg beater was an object I could not categorize. It looked like a "real" object; it appeared to be a tool that should belong in my own kitchen. After digging through my kitchen cupboards and drawers, however, I discovered it did not exist in my real world. Unlike the animals, this egg beater was not meant to be a symbol. It simply represented a utensil. So, as it was neither a symbol nor an object with which I was acquainted, I did not know what to do with it. Was this real or pretend? Was the book projecting reality or fantasy?
Language holds power. As my first literary encounter, this experience helped shape my identity as a reader. Richard Scarry's The Best Word Book Ever became a portal to the imagined world. I realized langauge can describe reality, and language can create new realities. I realized what I see and experience does not always match what I see and read in texts. I also became intrigued and inspired to discover what power my own words held. What worlds were there for me to create?
I can't remember a time in my life without owning books. As a child, I belonged to the "book of the month club" and I remember standing on the porch, waiting for the mail carrier to bring that huge cardboard box filled with new hardcover picture books. Even before I could read words on a page, I knew I was a reader. Even now, I still own several of my childhood books. Though most are missing their covers and their inside pages are tattered, they hold value; these are my passports to literacy.
The Pig Book
No one knows what happened to The Pig Book's glossy hard cover. One day it simply disappeared, perhaps slipping beneath the sagging frame of our sectional couch, or maybe it's tucked in some corner of a dark, cluttered closet. Now this book is just a stack of torn, ruffled-edged pages, its crumbling binding held together with brown masking tape. Maybe that's why I started calling it The Pig Book. When the cover disappeared, I couldn't read the "real" title anyway. So, Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever became the Pig Book, and no one asked why. It was just a worn, coverless book that no one else seemed to care about. But, to me it was special. Inside this book was a world where animals live, sleep, laugh, and play under a sky that is always painted brilliant blue. In these pages, bears, dogs, pigs, cats, and rabbits dress in overalls and business suits, wear aprons and firefighter hats. Here animals push shopping carts down the aisles of the supermarket and build sandcastles on beaches. Here rabbits till the corn fields, pigs smile from behind the butcher's counter, and whole families of cats join together to eat a turkey dinner. This world was a magical place where even worms and beetles drive insect-size cars, and sometimes those cars are in the shape of a pickle.I didn't need to know how to read, how to sound out letters and string those sounds into words, to know that this book told stories. As many stories as I could imagine the pigs and bears and cats living in their bright little world. All I had to do was flip open a page, and I could hop on the firetruck zooming through the city streets, lay back on the hay wagon as it rumbled down a dirt road, or climb a steep mountain p
The strange, silvery object
My sunny days in The Pig Book quickly ended one afternoon as I watched Mother Pig and her piglets bake cookies in their bright yellow kitchen. On these pages, cooking utensils, appliances, and food were scattered across Mother Pig's counter. There was a brown funnel and a powder blue electric mixer, broken egg shells and a bottle of ketchup. The entire kitchen must have been buzzing with noise: beaters mixing cookie dough, piglets licking spoons, and the clang of metal baking sheets scraping the oven's wire racks. This kitchen probably smelled like warm vanilla, just like my kitchen at Christmas when my mom, sister and I baked sugar cookies for all our neighboors. This kitchen was busy and loud, messy and perfect - except for one small detail. Right there, in the middle of the page, one the piglets was using a strange thing to stir cookie dough. Piglet was holding something in his hands - something silvery and wirey.
I took the book to my "real" kitchen, hoping to find this strange, new object. I started with the bottom cupboards, the two next to the oven.
Here were our mixing bowls, stacked with the smallest on the inside. The biggest one was orange, like the shag carpet in our TV room, and it had a large chip at the top. I peered inside the big orange bowl, there was nothing inside that looked like piglet's silvery object. So, I pushed the stack of bowls aside and looked behind them. There were all our metal baking pans - all different shapes and sizes, from small little rectangles, just right for banana bread, to wide, flat circle pans, which we always used for making pizza. Nowhere in this mountain of metal, though, was the wirey little object from my book. Where to look next?
Above the two cupboards were two wide drawers. I pulled both of them open. Inside one was a mish-mash of utensils - white, rubber spatulas; wooden spoons; big, black soup ladels; and spiky-tipped pastry brushes. Something small and silver was peeking out from under a pancake turner. I dug through the utensils and pulled it out - it was thin and wirey, a small metal whisk that my mom used to make scrambled eggs. Laying the whisk on the page of my book, I looked at both objects. They were both silver, but they weren't exactly the same. Piglet's object had a turney wheel and a wide, round handle. My whisk was just a whisk, a spool of thin metal with no wheel, no handle.
Tossing the whisk on the floor, I turned to the next drawer. Maybe Piglet's strange thing was in here. I plunged my fingers into a tangle of measuring spoons and found big ones, little ones, all them plastic and different colors. I knew the red one was the one we used for making cookies. The purple one my dad used to scoop coffee out of a big can. This wasn't what I wanted. I dug deeper into the drawer; here I found measuring cups, the same color as the spoons, and a plastic bag full of little metal things. Opening up the bag, I could see these were decorating tips for frosting. We used these to make our Christmas cookies. But that's all that was in the bag. No other tools or utensils, no silvery metal thing like Piglet.
The missing egg beater
Frustrated that I couldn't find this strange thing that I also couldn't name, I started opening another cupboard door when my mom walked into the kitchen. I showed here the picture of piglet and his mysterious, silver object. Pointing to the words on the page, she showed me that this strange thing was called an egg beater. "Don't we have one?" I asked. She answered, "No." "But why?" I persisted. Shrugging her shoulders, she sighed, "Well, I guess we don't really need one."
I didn't really like her answer. The silvery, wispery egg beater looked like a fun thing to own. I could just imagine myself perched on a stool, leaning over the counter, just like piglet. I could feel the small handle grasped in my fingers and hear the whir of its spinning wheel as it stired together dough. It didn't matter that we had a perfectly good electric mixer, a drawer full of wooden spoons, and all sorts of other nifty cooking utensils. I wanted an egg beater; I wanted my kitchen to look like the pig family's kitchen. Somehow their kitchen seemed perfect, more complete, than my own.
Literacy Lessons from The Pig Book
Reflecting on this experience as an adult reader, thinker, writer and teacher, I wonder how my confusion over the missing egg beater affected my perceptions concerning the "truths" books contain and my understanding that language holds power.